The Life of George Eliot | Page 8

was
written under the stress of emotion.' But what a prodigious contrast
between her pace and Walter Scott's twelve volumes a year! Like many
other people of powerful brains, she united strong and clear general
retentiveness with a weak and untrustworthy verbal memory. 'She
never could trust herself to write a quotation without verifying it.'
'What courage and patience,' she says of some one else, 'are wanted for
every life that aims to produce anything,' and her own existence was
one long and painful sermon on that text.
Over few lives have the clouds of mental dejection hung in such heavy
unmoving banks. Nearly every chapter is strewn with melancholy
words. 'I cannot help thinking more of your illness than of the pleasure
in prospect--according to my foolish nature, which is always prone to
live in past pain.' The same sentiment is the mournful refrain that runs
through all. Her first resounding triumph, the success of Adam Bede,
instead of buoyancy and exultation, only adds a fresh sense of the
weight upon her future life. 'The self-questioning whether my nature
will be able to meet the heavy demands upon it, both of personal duty
and intellectual production--presses upon me almost continually in a
way that prevents me even from tasting the quiet joy I might have in
the work done. I feel no regret that the fame, as such, brings no pleasure;
but it is a grief to me that I do not constantly feel strong in thankfulness
that my past life has vindicated its uses.'
Romola seems to have been composed in constant gloom. 'I remember
my wife telling me, at Witley,' says Mr. Cross, 'how cruelly she had
suffered at Dorking from working under a leaden weight at this time.

The writing of Romola ploughed into her more than any of her other
books. She told me she could put her finger on it as marking a
well-defined transition in her life. In her own words, "I began it a
young woman--I finished it an old woman."' She calls upon herself to
make 'greater efforts against indolence and the despondency that comes
from too egoistic a dread of failure.' 'This is the last entry I mean to
make in my old book in which I wrote for the first time at Geneva in
1849. What moments of despair I passed through after that--despair that
life would ever be made precious to me by the consciousness that I
lived to some good purpose! It was that sort of despair that sucked
away the sap of half the hours which might have been filled by
energetic youthful activity; and the same demon tries to get hold of me
again whenever an old work is dismissed and a new one is being
meditated' (ii. 307). One day the entry is: 'Horrible scepticism about all
things paralysing my mind. Shall I ever be good for anything again?
Ever do anything again?' On another, she describes herself to a trusted
friend as 'a mind morbidly desponding, and a consciousness tending
more and more to consist in memories of error and imperfection rather
than in a strengthening sense of achievement.' We have to turn to such
books as Bunyan's Grace Abounding to find any parallel to such
wretchedness.
Times were not wanting when the sun strove to shine through the
gloom, when the resistance to melancholy was not wholly a failure, and
when, as she says, she felt that Dante was right in condemning to the
Stygian marsh those who had been sad under the blessed sunlight. 'Sad
were we in the sweet air that is gladdened by the sun, bearing sluggish
smoke in our hearts; now lie we sadly here in the black ooze.' But still
for the most part sad she remained in the sweet air, and the look of pain
that haunted her eyes and brow even in her most genial and animated
moments, only told too truly the story of her inner life.
That from this central gloom a shadow should spread to her work was
unavoidable. It would be rash to compare George Eliot with Tacitus,
with Dante, with Pascal. A novelist--for as a poet, after trying hard to
think otherwise, most of us find her magnificent but unreadable--as a
novelist bound by the conditions of her art to deal in a thousand

trivialities of human character and situation, she has none of their
severity of form. But she alone of moderns has their note of sharp-cut
melancholy, of sombre rumination, of brief disdain. Living in a time
when humanity has been raised, whether formally or informally, into a
religion, she draws a painted curtain of pity before the tragic scene.
Still the attentive ear catches from time to time the accents of an
unrelenting voice, that proves her kindred with